Author Archives: Jenny Léger

Unknown's avatar

About Jenny Léger

An English teacher working at a French university. Funology is my thing !!

The Balancing Act

Posted on by

work life balance

I recently read a blogpost about how the Work-Life balance should in fact be called the Life-Work balance. I thought a lot about that at the time and I remember that I actually switched off the computer and went to make chocolate brownies with my son instead of spending time reading blogposts ! Here is the photo we took to prove it.2014-01-04 14.25.47 A sharp reminder of how important it is to try to maintain a balance came this week when I learned that a dear colleague from one of my training courses had been a victim of a stroke in his classroom. The news is fairly positive and he appears to be slowly regaining use of his faculties, but what a wake up call !

work life

Like many of us, and like my colleague, I often put my work before other things. How many cinema trips, football matches, films on the TV have I missed beause I have reports to finish, a presentation to tweak, books to mark ? I know that I am a perfectionist and just as I am very demanding of others, I am even more demanding of myself. But this weekend, as I think of my colleague and how things have just had to grind to a halt for him, whether he likes it or not, I think about how I must learn to re-assess too.

While I want my lessons to be as funky and as all-singing, all-dancing as possible, sometimes I just can’t. And while I want my training sessions to be 150%, sometimes they just can’t be. This morning I spent an hour making soup and a chicken pie for lunch. That should be normallity not exceptional. I actually really enjoyed it whereas generally I am not a keen cook. but the sheer normality of it felt relaxing and yet almost extravagant. Taking time out to relax is so important and yet, so hard to do a lot of the time.

A few weeks ago I did the Big Switch Off. I am not going to do that again tomorrow, but I am going to take the time out tomorrow to make a Sunday roast (roast beef and yorkshires any takers?) and to go and clear out the weeds in the front bed before they get out of hand – and to take the time to just enjoy my Sunday. Days off work are not just days given to us to catch up on what we didn’t have time to do in the week work-wise – and it is about time I started to believe that !! Anyone else feel the same ?

scale

The Cup Song

Posted on by

A special dedication to Akhésa and Cécilia from my L classes at school this year, who introduced me to the  “Cup Song”. Congratulations to the pupils from the Collège Racinay and to my colleague and Twitter friend, Elisa for putting this together. I would so have loved to be part of it. I promised my girls to post on this topic and so here we are, with a little extra, a special tap dancing version too as a bonus.

Another goal to reach

Posted on by

As I am writing, the number of hits on this blog is 18,374. With three and a half weeks until the Easter holidays, my goal is to reach 20,000 hits before Easter. Can we do it ? Yes, we can !! I know we can. How do I know this ? Because I am confident in the knowledge that my pupils are working hard and using this blog to do so. I can see it on the stats as I follow who is doing what. I see it in their work in the classroom as they re-invest what they have been doing at home.

I know we can do it because I see also the countries that are following my blog too. I check my stats page every day to see which countries are there and I smile to myself as I realize that people around the world are checking out what I have to offer. It is very exciting being part of the blogosphere and to know I am being read around the world.

So, we’re on the road to 20,000 before April 19th. Let’s see how quickly we can get there, everyone.

tm_countdown

Happy Birthday

Posted on by

My wonderful son is 18 years old today.

birthday_graphics_31It makes me feel old to think I have two adult sons now. How is that possible ? I still feel like a quite a kid myself. But hey ho – what goes around comes around, as they say. So a big big big birthday hug to my T, and to all sons (and daughters everywhere). They keep us young.

 

Some music for today’s post

Posted on by

What do you think of this music ?

My eldest son is studying music in the UK and he was part of this mix. I am, of course, his Number One fan !! Click on LIKE if you like his music. If I get a decent amount of likes, I will link in to his Sound Cloud.

The simplest ideas are often the best

Posted on by

Well, now that I have switched back on again, I thought I would start things up again with something that happened this morning in the first hour back at school. My Terminale students, sweet as they are, have terrible trouble switching from positive to negative to present to past to future – simple grammar mnipulation stuff but which is actually really difficult. So I wanted to give them some practice – but in a fun way. Here is what we did.

Each student chose a verb from a pack of verb cards (all irregular verbs) and made a statement of his/her choice using that verb. We then moved things on by introducing a dice.red-dice-icon

I had anticipated the activity by selecting a time expression for each side of the dice, so

1 = yesterday

2 = tomorrow

3 = at the moment

4 = three weeks ago

5 = on Wednesdays

6 = next week

Other choices could be made but I wanted to cover past, present and future. So, when the students rolled the dice, they then had to manipulate the tenses to use their verb in the appropriate tense.

To make it harder still, I produced my cards. On these cards, I had drawn a plus sign, a minus sign and a question mark. For each student, they had to manipulate the tenses of the sentences and then also make the sentences negative, positive or interrogative. It was a fun and engaging game and at the same time, provided valuable practice for jumping from one tense to another.

The next stage (which we didn’t have time to do unfortunately) would be to get the students to write some of their sentences down from memory. Also, I had planned to split into smaller groups to avoid playing in a whole class situation and to increase speaking time, but again, time ran away with us.

Great fun – minimum preparation time – endless possibilities for playing this game over and over. And one final advantage, it is the sort of game which, next time, could be totally pupil-led. Always a good sign.